The cash supply chain is manual, complex, has inherent risk issues, and is dispersed throughout a network of customers, armored carriers, the Fed (Federal Reserve), and/or a network of client facing devices including but not limited to automatic teller machines (ATMs), cash vaults, banking centers, safes, cash recyclers, and other cash handling devices. The costs of depositing, distributing, and managing cash across a major bank, as well as the amount of daily excess cash carried by such a bank, can be on the order of billions of dollars.
Today's client deposit process does not adequately allow clients to view the status of their deposit bag as it makes its way from the client's site where the deposit was prepared to the bank or bank's representative who will continue the processing of the deposit. Deposit bags are handled multiple times in the current process (and possibly by many different parties), which increases potential errors and complicates finding missing deposits or understanding where errors occurred and assigning fiduciary responsibility for those errors. Pertinent pieces of deposit data are typically manually entered and reentered into various systems throughout the end-to-end processing of the deposit. The collaboration and sharing of information across multiple organizations and with multiple vendors may make this process very complex and increases risk to the bank and bank clients.
Sometimes anomalies and/or other suspicious events occur that risk the security of the cash involved in the cash supply chain. These events must be investigated to prevent permanent loss of the physical cash itself and/or comprise the integrity of the cash supply chain system or any confidential data associated therewith. In some circumstances, these suspicious events are merely accidents or oversights that lead to the misplacement of physical cash. Other times, the suspicious events are deliberate thefts of the physical cash. In either instance, an investigation is usually commenced upon the discovery that a suspicious event has occurred, is occurring, and/or is about to occur. The investigation aims to recover the lost/stolen physical cash, identify the problem or source of the suspicious event, or identify the thief of the physical cash.
Suspicious events are often unpredictable and therefore video is usually recorded in the financial institution's cash vault. In essence, the video surveillance records the video as a pre-emptive measure to a suspicious event. Once the suspicious event occurs, the cause or source of the suspicious event may be hard to determine without video documentation of the happenings surrounding the event and/or leading up to the event. This system results in a high quantity of relatively irrelevant video that is recorded during normal operations and small quantities of highly relevant and useful data that are recorded during the suspicious event.
When an event occurs somewhere in the cash vault, each moment of the video must be reviewed to identify the cause or source of the problem. Reviewing all of the video is a monumental task. Hours upon hours of video may need to be reviewed during this process. Unfortunately, most of the video is not relevant to the suspicious event and very little, if any, correlation exists between the video and the cash vault process. The video and the cash vault process function independently, even though they are highly related. These challenges make the review of the video surveillance very cumbersome, time-consuming, and inefficient. To reduce the amount of time that is required to review the video, teams of people are often charged with the task of reviewing the video. Such a dedication of personnel increases costs and the risk of errors.
Therefore, advancements in the art of video surveillance within the cash vault, and event along other portions of the cash supply chain would be welcomed.